


Sweet Corn Sounds

by sprinkles888



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Not Human, Experimental Style, Gen, Midwest, general eeriness, mentions of canon pairings - Freeform, midwest gothic, what's out in those corn fields that scares you so much?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 01:59:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprinkles888/pseuds/sprinkles888
Summary: Sometimes, when their daddy’s had just a touch of alcohol, enough to loosen his tongue, but not enough to send him down a spiraling twist of anger, he’ll tell them the story, eyes far away."Your mama, she walked outta that field, tall and proud, and the stalks, they followed her."And the boys, with their ears just a little too pointed and their fingers a little too itchy and their hearts a’calling for a field to call their own, why they listen with all the intensity of their souls.





	Sweet Corn Sounds

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/161099712@N05/33851810078/in/dateposted/)

Sometimes, when their daddy’s had just a touch of alcohol, enough to loosen his tongue, but not enough to send him down a spiraling twist of anger, he’ll tell them the story, eyes far away.

_Your mama, she walked outta that field, tall and proud, and the stalks, they followed her._

And the boys, with their ears just a little too pointed and their fingers a little too itchy and their hearts a’calling for a field to call their own, why they listen with all the intensity of their souls. This is how they know their mama, Sam ‘specially. Dean has faded memories, soft in the way fields of wheat gleam as the sun goes down. His mama, hair yellow as the corn they shucked on the back porch, singing in a language Dean swears he thinks he knows, but can never remember.

Those same nights, once the story gets too hard, and John’s a’gone away in the bottle, Sam’ll pad outside—the motel, the cabin, the apartment—wherever they’re calling base that week, in bare feet, and Dean’ll follow, and they’ll stare up at the stars but never question the constellations that could be formed, digging toes into—grass, gritty concrete, dirt—whatever they can.

 _Did you know,_ Sam’ll say, toes dug in, eyes glinting, because he’s always been able to see a little too well in the shadow, _Kansas is seventh in the country for agriculture._

Dean does know, replying, _And the States are the biggest corn growers in the world._

A jingle, a clink, will come from whatever pocket Sam’s been keeping his things in, and he’ll pass over some, and Dean’ll grab with quick fingers the shiny things that glint in whatever light they have, and tell Sam off for stealing, but he won’t take back the things Sam gives him either.

Dean likes shiny things more than Sam does. Sam likes other things, buttons and yarn and strange leaves he can look up in the worn book he keeps in his duffle and scraps of food he digs out of his pockets whenever he or Dean has a rumbly stomach in the backseat.

 _Magpie_ , Dean teases whenever dad demands Sam empty his pockets to find whatever shotgun shell or lost pen he’s looking for that day. Sam sticks out his tongue when he’s younger, fumes when he’s older, teases back when he’s even older, _Blue Jay._

Years later, when it gets dangerous, that’s how they’ll put each other’s burners in as contacts in their phones—Maggie and Jay. Birds ‘n flight. Stealing away. When they’ve got an idea that could be dangerous because they’re a part a’ the hunting world, and they don’t want the person they’re working a hunt with to know about it, Dean or Sam’ll mention calmly _think Maggie would have an idea how to work this? We could call Jay, see if he’s got a lead._

Not many hunters catch on to the strange glint in Sammy Winchester’s eyes when they leave coins in reach, or the way Dean Winchester can load n’ shoot a gun quick enough to have not needed a second shooter for JFK if he’d only been around way back then.

But Bobby, he catches on, over time. He’s got a good enough eye and a sharp enough mind to notice that Sam can find lost things all too easy, and Dean can appear out of nowhere if you let him go still on you. He can see the sharpness of their teeth, back behind where their canines are supposed to end.

He loves ‘em anyway, slaps them ‘round the head a bit when they lure deer nearby just by nature of being curiosities and won’t let him shoot the bucks, but trades them food and beds and free roaming of his scrapyard for nothing except a helping hand here and there and to give back whatever things they steal when fingers get itchy. Sam and Dean—who both know trades and deals like they’re written on the inside of their skeletons—know the value of the things Bobby gives, more so than Bobby does. They take care of his scrapyard, wander it and think that maybe that when the wind blows through, it sounds sort of like how home is supposed to.

It’s really only Bobby and Pastor Jim in the hunting world that see past Dean’s bad-boy act, wearing his daddy’s leather jacket, and through Sam in his brother’s hand-me-downs with books and attitude. It’s only Bobby who sees the half of them that’s part of those wandering corn-field figures and smiles.

After all, Karen had always been tugged toward the woods, the trees, the aching forests of the north. It’s not all that different.

Those months, awful for Sam during, and awful for Dean after, when Dean’s itchy, hungry fingers that think too much about how Sam hasn’t been able to pull food out of his pockets at all that week get the better of him, Sam huddles in a ball in Bobby’s front room most of the time he’s not in school, and huddles in a ball in the scrapyard the rest of it. He’s the very definition of morose, and Bobby starts purposefully leaving things out for Sam to put in his pockets—pennies, pebbles, pinecones—just to coax Sam out of his too-still sitting. Even that doesn’t tempt him, and Bobby worries.

It isn’t until one day when Bobby dumps a clean load of laundry on the couch to get to later, after he fields this call from Neil-who-isn’t-the-other-Neil-Bobby-knows and comes back to find Sam clutching the sleeve of one of his well-worn shirts that he’d been intending to rip into rags for weeks, eyes glossy, that they make a trade.

 _You can have it,_ Bobby says, making Sam jump guiltily and drop the shirt, _If you’ll stop sitting around moping all the damn time._

Sam glances at him with unreadable emotion, and then back at the shirt. They don’t shake or sign a contract, but Sam wears the shirt with the sleeves rolled up and reads his way through the part of Bobby’s library that’s in English and asks Bobby to teach him ancient Sumerian so he can read that part too.

Later, when the rumbling of the Impala is heard outside the kitchen window, Sam shrugs off the shirt in a hurry and presses it to Bobby’s chest.

 _Dad’ll just rip it up to clean guns with, can you keep it?_ He asks, pleading. Keep it, he says with his eyes, keep it, keep it, keep it.

Bobby ruffles hair that’s grown out to cover his ears, and says, _Of course_.

Something in Sam’s pocket jingles when he shoves a hand in there, and he pulls out the lost things he’s collected over the weeks and hands them over. A trade, sealed in trust and kindness.

Fingers trace over the wedding picture Bobby’d lost to the endless stacks of books years ago, and the pen that had rolled under the fridge that he’d never gotten up the motivation to fish out, and John barges in, tells Sam to pack up _We’re goin’ to go get Dean_ , and Sam moves like he’s been shot outta the barrel of a gun to pound up the stairs to the extra bedroom.

 _Good to see you too,_ Bobby gripes, tucking picture and pen into his own pockets and gently setting the shirt on the counter to hang up later.

 _Didn’t give you too much trouble?_ John asks by way of welcome.

And Bobby has never had to lie in answer to that question, but he’d be willing to, _No, good kid. Teacher’s ‘ll be pissed they’re losing their best student._

John doesn’t quite roll his eyes, but it’s a near thing.

The next times the boys visit—just Sam, most the time, sort-of grumpy about being left behind on some hunt or another, but sometimes with Dean along—Sam heads straight for Bobby’s closet and tugs the old shirt on and grins a too-big too-large too-wide but completely honest grin at Bobby when he goes hurtling back down the stairs. Dean, the couple times he’s there, is jealous enough to make his green eyes all too appropriate, so Bobby pulls out a hat he never really wears anymore because of dusty memories and gets a trade for two-dollars and seventeen cents in a Sacagawea dollar, three quarters, three dimes, and twelve pennies that Dean digs out of his duffle pocket.

Dean takes the hat with him, but the shirt hangs for a long time in Bobby’s closet after John goes too far with his boys and his obsession and Bobby cocks a gun in his direction.

He watches that car speed away, and he won’t see it again for far too long, long enough that his scrapyard goes silent sometimes. Waiting. Quiet. Hungry.

The Impala is constantly shining once John hands over the keys that have spent more time in Sam’s pockets than John’s own to Dean, who whoops his excitement to the heavens and the Lord above and takes Sam out on the back roads they’ve grown up on, inching that needle up the speedometer whenever they spot a soy field, just to see the way Sam smiles when they rocket past.

Soy is a dirty word among their three-part family. They once spent three days in a nice little rental trailer in Nebraska that was paid out for the month, but didn’t stick around longer than that because John hadn’t realized they were in the middle of soy fields, and his boys went absolutely ape after the second night of being surrounded. John grumbled and griped about lost money and a downpayment, but let his shoulders sink in relief once Dean and Sam had quieted down and curled up with their heads a’ stacked up with a pillow between ‘em on the middle seat, Dean getting squished, but more than alright with it, because it meant he couldn’t hear the soy a’ callin’ anymore.

 _You soy milk drinking bastard,_ Sam once said to Dean, and they didn’t speak to or acknowledge the other’s existence for two straight weeks, until a thunderstorm broke overhead in Nowheresville rural Montana and they grinned at each other and went to splash in the puddles in bare feet and shudder when thunder rolled on through. They both got colds, real bad, and there were only two beds, and John was there working at a shop in the city, so Dean complained about Sam’s space heater tendencies for another two weeks, but they came out of it with some inside joke about tadpoles that John couldn’t hope to understand and a bit more wariness of the cold.

The tiny plug-in popcorn popper is the only real kitchen item they keep in the car, if you don’t count the knives—Sam doesn’t, John does, and Dean doesn’t care an inch about it. Dean’ll jump at any excuse to pop some—movie night, tv night, I’m-hungry-Sam-says night—and it’s better than nearly expired cans of spaghettios, so Sam grins and says, _need more fiber in your diet_? with a wide enough grin to send Dean a’ ramblin’ and hootin’.

 _Corn syrup is in a lot of what we eat_ , Sam says, nodding solemnly in yet another diner.

John nods absentmindedly and scratches his nose while turning the newspaper to the next page. Political cartoons and a how-to growing guide for watermelons.

Dean nods back though, same solemn expression. John can’t quite understand, but then, they can’t really either. They’ve got Winchester in their blood too, not just the swaying of the corn fields.

Monsters can smell it sometimes, sense it other times. Not ghosts, they mostly couldn’t care less who was sending ‘em off, more about stopping ‘em than anything. Werewolves, if they get too close. That snake-thing in Florida one sticky summer. Later, the demons, even later, the angels.

 _This world_ , Castiel would say with seriousness, one day, in response to questioning, his own, and from the Winchesters, _is not just humanity. God loved it all, and so Lucifer hates it all, and Michael purports to protect it all._

And Sam and Dean, who know the ancientness of the earth in the smell of their sweat and the ache of their joints, think about a God who loved the stretching fields and unyielding forests and tangling humanity and looming deserts and swirling swamps, and start laughing.

When Sam is small, small enough to disappear in a crowd, in a barn, in a field if you don’t hold his hand real real tight, his teacher reads them a story about a tree who gave away everything and Sam bursts into tears that don’t stop rolling until they fetch Dean from three classrooms down the hall and he holds Sam tight enough to steal his breath. Everyone always tells them Sam’s smart. Everyone’s always too afraid to think about what that means.

And in that town, with the scarecrow and the worshipers, they fight like swallows defending the nest and Sam starts a’ walkin’. The scarecrow though, he can’t attack Dean, he doesn’t. But Sam saves him anyway, when Dean gets a little too close to walking into a field for good.

Dean with his itchy fingers and searching and eyes that lure in girls, sweet ones and mean ones and lost ones, tells Sam once, after he’s spun himself into an old blessed site to send ruin the way of a truck gone mad, that his girl, the one who almost made him want to stay in the land of soybeans, was from the sea a long way away. She never remembered it, but he could taste it when he kissed her, smell it in her hair.

In trade, Sam tells Dean that his girl was as human as can be, but that her family’d made deals long long ago that Sam could see written on her closed eyelids when she slept. Deals that meant that sometimes, just sometimes, the wind curled through her fingers and her hair and wound around them when they walked, hand in hand.

 _She was like the desert,_ Sam says to the rumbling of the car, _but she was too far away to be welcome there._

And in that silence, they both wonder if they’d be welcomed.

Ellen and Jo are just as human as Bobby is, but there’s shocks there, beneath their skin, that make Sam and Dean a little nervous, because lightning is a beautiful risk, an ancient power. They respect it, acknowledge it, inch their way out of the Roadhouse because it’s never been a field they know.

Prison does not welcome them, and they don’t welcome it. It’s hard to goad anyone into a fight, because all these men, they know the line between fighting and suicide. They manage it, with a man who spent his life in fields and knows how to handle the strange figures you can sometimes see out of the corner of your eye.

Dean mourns him when he dies. Not many like that, who welcome the wanderers.

When their daddy made his trade, they mourned too, and wandered Bobby’s scrapyard in silence. Dean fixed up his baby, shined her until she sparkled more than the day she was made.

And when Dean makes his, Sam wakes up knowing it, feeling it seeping stink right under his nose, and he tears up the world around him with his yelling and fear like a tornado outside of its alley. They of all people should know, he says, _You don’t make trades like that._

And Dean, with his daddy’s coat and his daddy’s car and his daddy’s loyalty bites in and doesn’t let go, a storm cellar when Sammy goes a’ spinnin’.

When Sam loses Dean beneath the earth—not in it, he could tell if it was in it—and after he’s ignored the calls of the fields for miles to just _leave him here, here, here,_ he turns to Ruby who burns and burns and burns like a wildfire, and he drinks like he’s been in drought.

 _Controlled burn,_ she says.

 _Controlled burn,_ he agrees.

It tastes like the time he and Dean burned down a field with fireworks on the Fourth of July. Power, destruction, blazing glory in its most dangerous form. Only problem is, he’s got no ditches dug when it starts to go wild.

For Dean, reaching out of the earth toward the sun is easy as good pie, warm, crusty, gushing. He wanders, blankly for a while, until a sound like a tornado siren installed just behind his ears goes off and shatters glass and rattles the world, and he sucks in the first breath he’s really aware of. He’s never really sure if he breathed before that, if he came out the ground with lungs deflated. He can’t remember struggling for it, in his shoddy coffin.

Angels don’t feel like much of anything, except they kind of—sound, taste, smell—feel like the sun when you get close enough. Dean thinks maybe that’s what draws Sam to them, eyes sunflowering, turning, aching for that light. _Heliotropism,_ Sam had said one day, tongue curling against the feel of the word on the crumbling boardwalk of a lake, paging through a book, _young sunflowers do it. Turn toward the sun._

Dean sometimes chews sunflower seeds like he might have chewed tobacco if he wasn’t smarter than the call of nicotine.

 _And old sunflowers?_ He’d asked, feet in the water and pruning real fast.

Sam licks his thumb, turns the page with it, _They face east, most the time._

 _Morning nutrients,_ Dean jokes.

 _Breakfast,_ Sam nods, with a smirk.

Chuck is terrified of them from the instant they introduce themselves. He keeps his eyes on the doors, the windows, the stairs—escape routes, but only up until they sink into calm sitting positions and question. He quiets then, answers their questions without fear. He knows them, their story at least. Has worked with it, molded it, edited and added, confused and troubled his readers with it. The ones who read it who watch the fields out their windows at night understand.

His publishers are from the bustle of Boston. Chuck can’t really explain it to them, the way the story of two brothers from the fields of Kansas who fight the monsters in the dark because they know the dark like another brother appeals to the fans. It’s something that pokes at the knowledge some keep behind their eyes because they’re too afraid to look it straight in the face.

 _They’re smart about that,_ Sam says, staring out the window when Chuck remarks on it, _You should never make eye contact._

Chuck shivers, and he knows that that’s going to make it into the next book.

Adam Milligan isn’t tied to anything except the Winchester name and legacy. Too bad that he’s rotting when Sam and Dean stop by. Ghouls they can tell by the stench, it’s easy enough to get rid of them. Ghouls are scavengers.

They know the scavengers.

When they’re very young, just out of the fire, smoke taste still in their mouths, the only thing that will quiet Sam is swaying. Dean curls around him and moves with the wind that blows along the leaves of the trees outside.

Their trip to the past shows them why—their mama was always moving with the wind. Always stared just a bit too much too. Wide-eyed. Blank.

They spent a fall in Lubbock once. Windy, spinning. It spun them right outta their heads, and their daddy had to bundle them up himself, dragging boys and bags alike out to the car once he got back.

Walt and Roy aren’t the smartest of hunters, but they’ve been ‘round long enough to pick up on the murmurings by the more observant ones, long enough to have heard Gordon’s long, ranting, endless speeches about Sam Winchester, whose eyes dare you to die. Blood splatters, in the way blood does.

And the garden is the farm they spent three and a half months working for some contact Dad had—wheat, mostly, but tomatoes and zucchini and squash too. Wheat is more okay than soy, less so than corn, but more comforting. Joshua says _You see what you want to here._

And it ends, as things do, a field turned fallow, harvest is over. Like Gabriel, that burst of sunlight as he fell. That last curl of it when he sends them a' huntin' for rings to shove big brother back down into the earth. Backwards, to both Sam and Dean, but right. Like decomposition.

In that field, because it is a field, albeit one with bodies just beneath the struggling yellow grass, although Sam would argue that enough places have bodies beneath the surface that it doesn’t matter, there is no corn. There isn’t much of anything except grass and weeds and a car that gleams and makes Sam’s fingers itch because that gleam is Dean, and that right there is his sprawling field, not this crying-out-aching cemetery, and Lucifer’s fingers have never itched before, so Sam surfaces, and this time he uses the itch to steal himself away. And he goes beneath the earth with nothing in his pockets because he a’ went and gave it all to Dean before they walked into that house with shiny rings all huddled together.

Dean digs his fingers into the earth there and doesn’t let go for a long, long time, searching the deep earth for any sign, for anything that calls _Sam_.

He drives to go to Lisa, who twines and twists like the rainforest, but there are corn fields along the way, and he stops and does the one thing Dad had always told them to never do, the one thing that scared Dad more than anything, and walks right up to one with a calm stroke over his baby’s hood and a tucking of shining keys into jean pockets. Maybe he’ll find Sam somewhere in there, in the corn fields. Maybe he’ll never come out. Maybe, just maybe, the calls from the corn that _this is home, come home_ are real.

Maybe, maybe, he can go a’ callin’ to Bobby one day with a little brother in tow and barter for another hat to replace the one he lost a long time ago and cried over in a motel room all alone when dad had stopped callin’ all the time and Sam had gone to find his field in California, where grapes grow and twine and whisper stories.

 _Maybe, maybe_ the corn calls, like it always has. It goes silent, and birds and beasts alike hold their sounds in reverence or maybe fear.

And Dean walks in.

**Author's Note:**

> took a break from writing my SWBB piece to sweep the metaphorical dust off of some of my unpublished works/WIPs and found this from over a year ago with a note at the top of the document that read "I never want to research US agriculture again" and honestly? mood, past me, mood.  
> anyway, this was a bit of an experiment just for funsies. maybe I'll get around to publishing those other works that have been lying around uselessly for...a long time. there's so many for supernatural. why. save me.  
> also, i hope i can claim this is midwest gothic. sure hope so. tell me if that's like. gonna make you cry. or wander around in wide-awake woods too late at night.  
> i'm on tumblr as [sprinkles888](http://sprinkles888.tumblr.com) or catch my supernatural side-blog @ [ gen-spn](http://gen-spn.tumblr.com)


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